After 49 years as Cuba’s revolutionary leader, Fidel Castro has quit. He announced his departure in a characteristically long letter of resignation though his radio broadcast to the Cuban people yesterday morning was unusually brief.
Castro’s departure, through age and infirmity, was not unexpected. The reaction of the Bush White House was equally predictable. Now, said the president, Cuba was free to pursue the path of democracy to the betterment of the Cuban people. It is an interesting take on history. When Castro’s guerrillas ousted the Batista dictatorship in 1959, America had pretty well colonized the Caribbean island. But it was not the sort of colonization of which any American could be proud. Batista’s regime was notoriously corrupt and vicious and it enjoyed close relations with the US Mafia which operated casinos and brothels and dealt in narcotics and money laundering under the carefully averted gaze of the Cuban authorities.
Castro’s victorious troops drove the hoodlums from the country along with many of their Cuban henchmen. The latter went on to establish virulently anti-Communist and anti-Castro enclaves in the US, principally in southern Florida. Communist Cuba did not flourish economically and needed the support of the Soviet Union which cheerfully overpaid for Cuban sugar, the country’s main product. The payments supported Castro to the tune of some $5 billion a year. This was necessary because, in protest at the overthrow of their man Batista and the nationalization of all US businesses, Washington had cut all economic links. When the Soviet Union finally collapsed, so too did the handouts and Castro was reluctantly forced to turn to tourism to keep his inefficient economy alive.
But an efficient economy is not everything, as the repellent example of Gen. Pinochet’s Chile demonstrated. Whatever its shortcomings, (and it too is a police state), no one starved in Cuba and there remains today free health care and education and rudimentary welfare. There are indeed many millions of dirt-poor Americans currently enduring far greater economic deprivation than most Cubans. During Castro’s early years, Washington tried invading Cuba in 1961 and there were several attempts by the CIA to assassinate the charismatic leader, most farcically with an exploding cigar. Since the US forced Spain to give up Cuba in 1898, Washington has treated Cuba as its property — initially to be exploited and then, for the last 49 years, to be punished. Cubans may envy some US lifestyles but the more thoughtful and informed will rightly fear a return of US hegemony.
Washington could do two things straightaway to demonstrate its good intentions. First, it could unilaterally remove the economic embargo and let the Cuban authorities respond as they wish. Secondly, it could remove the detention camp and its occupants from Guantanamo Bay to the US mainland and so cleanse Cuba of a barbarity over which it has never had any control.
